The Walt Disney Co. has agreed to acquire Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in cash and stock, in one of the big stories the storm prevented us from reporting when it was announced yesterday. As noted by latimes.com, the deal includes ILM and most everything else from the Star Wars franchise to LucasArts, the company's gaming arm. The story focuses on plans to imbue Disney's theme parks with The Force and on plans to continue the Star Wars film series, but Forbes has word on the gaming implications of this, suggesting that this might make LucasArts' gaming efforts less focused, rather than more. They say Bob Iger indicated PC titles will likely be licensed, and "In its core division, Disney will likely be focusing on social and mobile games based around Star Wars." In the meantime, Star Wars 1313 is still on track, but they also note the complications of persuing other projects gamers dream about: "As for all those other dream titles? Itís more complicated than just Lucas being out of the picture. KOTOR 3 for example is under the license granted to EA/Bioware currently, and after the disaster of The Old Republic, itís hard to imagine them gambling on a game so similar, even if the old ones were classics."

fawker wrote on Oct 31, 2012, 15:06:Lucas just had a great idea and sold it well. He can't direct, he has a horrible touch on the franchise. By far the best film was Empire Strikes Back, which benefited from a "real" director.

Disney couldn't do any worse.

You say that now but just wait until they get Michael Bay on board!

Seriously though, this is a lot of hemming and hawing over nothing. The same kind of outcry was heard when Disney bought Marvel and what happened? They just let Marvel do it's own thing and got a gem of a film out of it. I am sure they're just as keen to let Lucasfilm roll it's own Star Wars film with as little interference as possible.

Besides I think Lucas has spent the last couple decades effectively putting nails in the Star Wars coffin with crappy new movies and his continuous need to defile the old ones with every format change so it's not like it wasn't all circling the drain anyway. Frankly I have to applaud the man. First he rang every ounce of cash from that cow by slapping the Star Wars name on everything he could then cloned the cow and got a couple billion more and when he finally ran out of ways to rehash it he sold it all and got a few billion more out of it. So, bravo!